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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26383759">we have grown up boy-shaped</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl'>tin_girl</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Pre-IT Chapter Two (2019), Retrospective, deus ex machina of some sort, the author has never been to America and it shows</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 08:55:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,672</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26383759</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Eddie doesn’t know the name for how there’s no space for Richie between his organs, and how he wants to clear space for Richie there anyway, but he knows this much: one day, he will suffer for it. </p><p>One day, he will walk right into somebody’s fist. </p><p>Or, homing instinct despite things left (un)said.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>we have grown up boy-shaped</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>In this fic, adult Richie lives in Chicago. I am not sure if canon-Richie actually lives there, since the internet says Chicago, then says Beverly Hills, then says Los Angeles, and then says Toronto, but please, for the sake of my sanity, let's assume it is indeed Chicago. Also, studying the US on google maps is a scary experience indeed, in that how can anything be so big? </p><p>Anyway, this has a few moments set during the first movie, a few set during the second movie, and a road trip of a sort in between the two</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>So I wait for you like a lonely house</span>
</p><p>
  <span>till you will see me again and live in me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Till then my windows ache.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>~Pablo Neruda, <em>Sonnet LXV</em></span>
</p><p> </p><p>It’s a chilly morning when Eddie gets in his car, flexes his hands before gripping the steering wheel, and drives away. I’m just getting pasta, he thinks to himself, checking the rear-view mirror, even though they never eat pasta (<em>hey, Eddie Spaghetti</em>—). Fifteen minutes later, he’s headed for the highway, thinking about how he should have taken his toothbrush.</p><p>It’s still a chilly morning when he decides he’ll go to Atlanta or Orlando, somewhere he’s never been to before that begins and ends with the same vowel.</p><p>It’s a hot afternoon when he doesn’t go to Atlanta. He doesn’t go to Orlando either.</p><p>He doesn’t have a map, and he doesn’t buy one – he doesn’t need it.</p><p>(<em>Why</em> doesn’t he need it?)</p><p>He’s not sure what it is exactly that won’t let him go anywhere but West. It’s not his heart, he knows that much. This – his knuckles white as he grips the steering wheel that he hasn’t disinfected in days – is too raw and unclean for something coming from the <em>heart</em>. Marrow, maybe, and Eddie has no reason to trust his (half the time, it seems like his bones must be faulty, hollow, what with his mother – what with Myra – really, he is <em>not</em> that fragile), but there’s nothing else left to trust in.</p><p>He doesn’t stop that first day, not really. Not for coffee, not for food, not to use the toilet. Once it gets late, the sunset obscene like a thickly-laid paint he itches to scratch off the sky, he considers getting a room, but drives on. It’s a little before midnight when he stops next to a two-star hotel and pays for a room, wondering if there’ll be cockroaches in the shower.</p><p>There aren’t cockroaches, but the bedsprings whine like something he almost remembers, and the room smells like all the other rooms Eddie has spent the past two (three?) decades in – that is to say, nothing at all like something even remotely close to home. In the end, he goes back to his car and settles in the backseat, forcing his Schrödinger’s bones to fold. This isn’t anything like home, either, no, but it’s a stop on the way to someplace that could be home, Eddie thinks.</p><p>He wonders, absently, if someone is going to murder him in the middle of the night, but wakes up alive and ready for the road.</p><p>*</p><p>As they stand in a circle holding hands clammy with blood, Eddie realizes that they’re not just too young for this: they’re too <em>small</em> for this. It’s easy to think that it had to be them, but really, bigger kids would have fit in those sewers, and everything that’s happened – Georgie, the scars on Ben’s stomach, Eddie’s arm – was a whim rather than an inevitability.  </p><p>For a second, Eddie lets himself imagine a Derry without It, one where no kid ever died – not like that, anyway – and one where he never would have had to open his hand with a knife under an indifferent sun that allowed all this to pass.</p><p>(Richie’s hand in his, warm as only alive things are, Eddie wondering if he’d get away with squeezing it warmer still).</p><p>He’s too small for this, too: too small to learn this about himself, how he wouldn’t have it any other way.</p><p>*</p><p>He arrives in Chicago in late afternoon, after having dumped his phone that wouldn’t stop ringing – that seemed to keep ringing even after Eddie turned it off – in the toilet at some gas station with outdated newspapers and a flickering lightbulb.</p><p>He parks near the city center, and when he gets out of the car that he now understands he got years ago just for this, he doesn’t stretch, too afraid of how his bones would behave here, where they so wanted to go.</p><p>Really, it’s not that windy, not at all. There’s an empty paper cup that looks unspeakably sad at the side of the road, and it stays motionless.  </p><p>What Eddie does in Chicago is this: he walks in confused circles, and he doesn’t take anything in. He’s misplaced something, he realizes, not here, somewhere else, a long time ago, and now – Now.</p><p>At some point, he smells coffee, and he doesn’t want coffee, not really, but he enters the café anyway. He takes a seat by the window, orders a cappuccino, doesn’t drink it once it arrives, lukewarm and with a packet of sugar on the saucer. He tears the packet and spills the sugar with the idea that he’ll trace a word in it on the no-doubt dirty table, only what word should he choose?</p><p>There’s a man at the next table over. Eddie has his back to him, and he never looks over his shoulder, but he becomes aware of the fact nonetheless – an impatient tap of a foot, a sigh, a – <em>smell</em>.</p><p>Outside, a horn blows. Inside, the song changes.</p><p>“Really, now?” the man seated at the next table over says, quietly, to himself.</p><p>It’s <em>Eddie My Love</em>, the song, and Eddie has heard it a hundred times before, of course he has, and so it makes sense that he suddenly feels like he’s just heard something familiar.</p><p>(Eddie has misplaced something—)</p><p>He almost laughs, except there’s no need, the man Eddie won’t look at is laughing for them both.</p><p>Eddie doesn’t know what to think of Chicago, except that he doesn’t remember even one block, and that the coffee is cheaper than he expected, and that, suddenly, it feels like his bones are breaking. It hurts like nothing he’s ever felt before, except he <em>has</em> felt this before, hasn’t he? Hasn’t he?</p><p>The song is all <em>Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast now</em>, all <em>the very next day might be my last</em>, and Eddie’s no longer sure that the man at the next table over is laughing. The hiccups are too quiet to really tell, but if Eddie’s being honest – and he <em>is</em> being honest, just for the afternoon, his phone probably still ringing even drowned in that toilet in the middle of nowhere on the way to somewhere – it sounds more like crying.</p><p>*</p><p>So what happens when they’re all back in Derry and determined to deal with It after all, the shape of a knife cut into Eddie’s cheek, is this:</p><p>Richie, who is everything like his thirteen-years-old self and nothing like his thirteen-years-old self both, takes a look at Eddie, leads Eddie to his hotel room, and ties Eddie to a chair.</p><p>Well, that’s not <em>exactly</em> what happens, or rather it is an abridged version of events. There is quite a lot of swearing, wrestling, and mutual trembling in between, and the chair falls over twice. By the time Eddie’s arms are tied behind his back, he’s left three bitemarks on Richie and a few scratches, too. For a moment, Eddie delights in imagining how the skin there will redden and rise, but when Richie fails to stop looking miserable, he only wishes his hands were free so he could try and touch the marks better somehow, an attempt at damage control.</p><p>It’s a joke, really. He and Richie, they’re no good at touching. Gone are the days of pushing each other’s heads under the surface of water too murky for comfort and sharing a hammock that was the only thing that memorable summer that they weren’t too small for. Now it’s all circles and circles and <em>circles</em> that just can’t cross, all ‘I will clap you on the shoulder, but only enough to take meaning out of how I <em>don’t</em> touch you’, all ‘I will stay away from you, but only enough to take meaning out of how, occasionally, I can’t.’</p><p>“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, then?” Eddie growls, and it’s almost aggressive enough on his tongue to kill this impossible softness that he feels watching Richie watch him with those eyes of his, softness like a deflating tire.</p><p>It’s always been easy to forget, both when they were small – Richie’s glasses thick like the bottom of coke bottles and his mouth dirty enough to distract them all from how Richie was more than just crude jokes – and now, but Richie’s eyes really are the saddest eyes Eddie has ever seen. He realizes, decades too late, that this must be why he’d look away from them so often – not because he didn’t want to look, but because it hurt too much whenever he did.</p><p>So Richie stares at him with his criminal offense of a pair of eyes, and he says, alright, says, look, says, listen, says, don’t you get it Eddie, says fuck, says <em>Eddie</em>, says just listen, says just shut up and let me <em>explain</em>, says you’re staying here, says, I mean it, says I fucking mean it, Eddie, says I am <em>not</em> losing you again.</p><p>“I am <em>not</em> losing you again, alright?” Richie says, shaking like there’s a draft, shaking like he’s sick (<em>is</em> he?), shaking like someone has died (<em>will</em> someone die?). He’s a disaster and always has been – his shirt is stained near the collar, his hair is a mess, and Eddie’s tied to a chair and can’t even check if it’s soft as well. He imagines that it must be, and that even if it isn’t, it still <em>would</em> be, somehow, if he got to – to touch it.</p><p>Eddie, who didn’t think he could collapse any more, collapses all over again.</p><p>“When did you lose me the first time?” he says softly, and almost remembers an almost something, how, once, he had to get a new phone because his old one— his old one—</p><p>(<em>He’s misplaced something</em>.)</p><p>“Neibolt Street, fucking clown, fucking It, fucking <em>fuck</em>, the <em>house</em>, Eddie, the fucking house with the fucking clown and your fucking arm, and It’s face too close to you, and how did it even <em>dare</em> get that close?”</p><p>He <em>must</em> be sick, someone <em>must </em>have died, look at how he’s shaking, oh, how he’s shaking.</p><p>“You fucking asshole,” Eddie says, hoping it’ll be some consolation. Judging by the way Richie’s shoulders slump, it just might be. Richie touches him then – his thumb and index finger carefully placed on Eddie’s cheek, pressing at his skin until the wound there closes and must look like a line drawn between two points on a map.</p><p>“You’re going to tell me that it has to be all of us, aren’t you?” Richie says, resigned.</p><p>“I’m going to tell you to fucking untie me, and I’m going to tell you that once this is all over, you’re explaining why the fuck you carry a rope around with you.”</p><p>Richie shakes his head, and Eddie can’t tell if they will ever get to remember this and laugh.</p><p>*</p><p>Eddie’s not sure when he started thinking that he and the man are sitting in that café <em>together</em>. He still hasn’t touched his coffee, and all he knows is that if someone came up to him now and said ‘mind if I join you?’ – not that anyone will – he’d apologize and explain that he’s already with someone.</p><p><em>Eddie My Love</em> is still playing. It’s been an hour, and it seems to be on a loop, <em>Eddie, please write me one line</em> over and over again.</p><p>“He won’t, you idiot,” the man at the next table over says. Whether he’s directing the words at the song is unclear. Eddie stares at the spilled sugar and gathers it into his hands, because he still hasn’t thought of any word worth tracing there, and doubts that he will.</p><p>It’s a hot afternoon, and the sun is filtering in through windows with fingerprints all over them, spilling across the table like something served that Eddie could eat, but Eddie isn’t hungry: the empty inside him longs to be filled, but not with food, and not with light.</p><p>(Eddie got his car nine years ago, and as he slowly drove it home that first day, he almost took a wrong turn, and almost went somewhere else.)</p><p><em>How I wanted for you, you’ll never know</em>, and the man at the next table over gets up like all the world has to know, chair legs scratching the floor until heads turn. Only Eddie doesn’t look, he’s too scared, he <em>won’t</em>.</p><p>That <em>smell</em> – it occurs to Eddie that it probably wasn’t the scent of coffee that made him come in.</p><p>The man stops on the way past Eddie’s table, and he’s not looking at Eddie – Eddie knows this, even though he still won’t look at the man himself.</p><p>Maybe they’re both scared.</p><p>The man leaves, the sound of the door shutting the sound of the door shutting the UNBEARABLE SOUND OF THE DOOR SHUTTING ringing in Eddie’s head, and Eddie can’t breathe, and what <em>is</em> that smell, and he tells himself that he’ll count to one hundred, except he forgets what comes after twenty-seven, and gets up so suddenly that his chair falls over. He rushes out into the street, glances left, glances right, runs left, changes his mind after ten steps, runs right, changes his mind again and remembers how, when the man laughed (cried?) at that damned song, Eddie’s very bones seemed to be rearranging themselves around the sound, eager to accommodate it.</p><p>He goes back to the café and takes a seat at the next table over to his. There’s an unfinished black coffee there, and a crumpled napkin, too. Eddie downs the coffee in two gulps, lets his lips linger on the rim of the cup like he’s never been afraid of germs in his life, and pockets the damp napkin.</p><p>Just then, he knows that he hasn’t been anywhere as familiar as that chair in a random café in well over twenty years.</p><p>*</p><p>Richie is another thing Eddie is simply too small for. That, at least, is as much literal as it is figurative – there is no way a boy like Richie, who’s all limbs, could fit inside a boy like Eddie, who’s all stunted growth. Richie couldn’t even ever hide behind Eddie, and it occurs to Eddie that ultimately it’s this, and not the teasing and the bullying, that he most hates about being short, how he can’t be a hiding place for the one person he’s starting to understand he needs hidden.</p><p>Why he understands this at thirteen, when he doesn’t even understand that he’s not going to die from an insect bite in a week’s time, is beyond him, because, figuratively, he’s too small for Richie, too: Richie, who’s never serious, as if he already knows that it’s the only way to hide that he’s <em>always</em> serious, can’t fit inside Eddie, who has too many things to worry about without having to worry about how when Richie laughs, spit flying every which way, Eddie’s ears always stubbornly choose that for the only sound they hear.</p><p>Eddie doesn’t know the name for how there’s no space for Richie between his organs, and how he wants to clear space for Richie there anyway, but he knows this much: one day, he will suffer for it.</p><p>One day, he will walk right into somebody’s fist.</p><p>*</p><p>It’s no longer sunny, and Lake Michigan looks like the side of a knife. It’s impossibly big – one of those phenomena one never grows up to stop fearing – and Eddie wonders how many people could drown in it before anyone would notice.</p><p>He’s been gone three days when he comes back home, and Myra cries and keeps asking what is this, what is this, pointing at his stubble. Eddie’s head hums, his heart sleeps, and his marrow says Chicago over and over, keeps saying it even once Eddie has unlearned to hear it. By the time Mike Hanlon calls, he and Myra have already forgotten. Mike says ‘Derry’ and Eddie remembers, his marrow doing the strangest things, the long-healed bone in his arm refusing to settle.</p><p>“The others are coming, too,” Mike tells him, and Eddie tries to undo all the forgetting he’s done, until he remembers that ‘others’ doesn’t only mean Stan and Bill and Ben and Bev, but means Richie, too.</p><p>(Lake Michigan stretched before him, he searched his pockets for that balled-up napkin until he found it, crumpled into something so small that he almost laughed (cried?) at the sight of it. Later, he stared at the ‘R+E’ scribbled on it in red pen, and couldn’t help but think that there must have been tens, <em>hundreds</em> of other napkins like that discarded in cafés all over Chicago, and, for a second, for two, he let himself daydream about staying in that city he wouldn’t remember later and patiently collecting them, one by one.)</p><p>He tells Myra he’s going and he goes. This time, he takes his toothbrush, because, one way or another, he just knows that he’s never coming back.</p><p>*</p><p>When Eddie wakes up, he almost regrets not having died in the sewers. How you live is one thing, but how you go is another, and whatever is still to happen, he knows that he will not be offered a death like this again: leaning over Richie and convinced that everything will end well after all.</p><p>He’s not sure how he survived, and wonders if perhaps Richie willed him alive somehow. It seems improbable – It was an evil force that went against people’s wishes, and there wasn’t ever anything to counterbalance it besides, well, them – but the realization that Richie must have wanted him alive enough to bargain with whatever <em>is</em> out there – never mind if he succeeded or not – seems more improbable still.</p><p>Still, it’s not Richie who’s at his side when Eddie wakes up, but Bev.</p><p>“Shsh,” she says before Eddie has so much as opened his mouth. “Don’t say a word.”</p><p>Nothing hurts, but nothing not-hurts either. Eddie wonders if Richie has gone already, if he took his rope, and got in his car, and drove away, wonders if the rest of his life will be just like the life he remembers having – reaching for maps at all the gas stations and unfolding them to check if Chicago would, yet again, be the first spot for his eyes to fall on.</p><p>Really, by now, Eddie must have seen more maps than medical prescriptions.</p><p>“Don’t say a thing, alright?” Bev says, folding a hand over his forehead as if to check for fever, of all things. Eddie’s too exhausted to wonder if he’s infected by It now, and he imagines that he’ll never have enough strength to really worry about it, which is just as well.</p><p>“You’d almost bled out by the time we got you out,” Beverly tells him, dabbing at his forehead with a tissue. Eddie decides that once he has the energy, he’ll ask her if she’s already kissed Ben. “Say, Eddie – well, <em>don’t</em> say, just nod, or bend your finger, or blink, or don’t do anything at all, if you don’t feel like it – but say, do you love him? You do, don’t you?”</p><p>Eddie realizes that his heart broke in the slowest possible way – has been breaking for twenty-eight years, and is breaking still. He doesn’t know how he could have forgotten these people, this place, all through that heartbreak, how he could have gone about his days making coffee, buying newspapers, and folding socks without constantly pressing play on the recording of Richie’s laugh that he kept stored in his head over the decades even as his memory successively got rid of everything else.</p><p>He nods, bends his finger, blinks, keeps blinking, his eyes Michigan-lake-wet, and he will never make coffee, buy a newspaper, or fold a single sock again without the awareness that, in the end, his life can be brought down to this: what he misplaced, and what has been returned to him, like a parcel that didn’t get lost after all.</p><p>Except.</p><p>Except where—? Except what if—?</p><p>(He thinks, I’m sorry that I never told you, he thinks, I will tell you now and maybe you will have the patience to listen, he thinks, wherever you are, it’s okay to stop shaking—</p><p>Because Eddie misplaced something once, something he was too small for—)</p><p>“Alright, I slept for two hours and seventeen minutes, you <em>have</em> to let me in now, Mrs. Soon-To-Be Hanscom, it’s simply criminal what you’re do— Oh, <em>fuck</em>.”</p><p>Eddie stares at Richie, who looks like he hasn’t slept in days, or weeks, or years, or ever, and suddenly, Eddie remembers It even smaller and more pathetic than when they yelled It dead. How stupid of It, that It spent an eternity trying to make the world worse, and worked so hard to kill all those people, when all It ever had to do was kill Richie, and already the world would be forever turned vile and unbearable, not worth it at all.</p><p>Eddie laughs himself into a coughing fit and, as Beverly and Richie fuss over him, he thinks that he can’t wait to tell them that he’s fine, that he’s looking forward to getting out of here, not just out of the hospital, and not even just out of Derry, that he’s leaving his wife, that, if he’s being honest, he has already left his wife, and that the next time the world serves him sun itself, he will have it.</p><p>Days later, Richie will casually ask him if he’s ever been to Chicago, and Eddie will tell him that he has, in fact, been to Chicago, but that he’d love to visit again, indefinitely, and then, once they will have left Derry behind, and once Eddie will have put his feet on the dashboard of Richie’s car (his own left behind, having served him well but no longer necessary), he’ll finally, finally ask Richie, who will still have Eddie’s blood under his nails, who will <em>always</em> have Eddie’s blood under his nails, about that damned rope.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>how I have always wanted to use that Neruda quote about being a lonely house and at last it happened at 4am when I desperately need sleep ....</p><p>I KNOW THAT I NEVER EXPLAINED HOW HE SURVIVED BUT THAT'S BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW. Look, we all want him alive, so what does it matter, really? </p><p>Anyway, thank you so much for reading!! Please, consider leaving a comment, nothing makes me happier than those &lt;3 And, I'm on tumblr @yoyointhegarden</p></blockquote></div></div>
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